CNBC reports that $250,000 will be the minimum investment from
Morgan Stanley's high-net worth investors.

Uber's current fundraising round will be capped at $2.1 billion.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Uber could not be
reached for comment and this post will be updated if we hear
back.

But this investment from some of Morgan Stanley's most prized
clients marks a continuation of one of the most interesting and
important themes in tech and finance — fields that are
becoming more intertwined: "private markets are the new public
markets."

Commentators from the tech and finance side of things — notably
venture capitalist Fred Wilson and
Bloomberg's Matt Levine — have used this refrain over the
last several months as the old dynamic of raising cash privately
until some mythical number that encourages companies to go public
is reached has been thrown out, more or less.

The short of the idea is that companies like Uber and Snapchat,
which conventional wisdom says should be nearing an IPO simply
because of their valuations, now have fewer reasons to make a big
push for an IPO. The primary financial concern of most young
companies is capital availability, and Uber and Snapchat — among
others — have found little difficulty getting funding as private
outfits.

And the entry of investors such as high-net worth clients at
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — Goldman's private wealth
clients
were involved in a prior round of Uber funding — indicate
that demand from nontraditional venture-capital-type investors
remains robust.

Hence, no need for a debut on the public market.

But with the entry of these investors, which has also
included mutual funds like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, startups
have in recent months been faced with a new set of
challenges — namely, the
much-ballyhooed write-down applied by Fidelity to its
stake in Snapchat.

Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU,
said in the fall that investors like Fidelity had no business
being involved with a company like Snapchat. Though Damodaran did
note that as the valuation of public tech companies fluctuates,
so too should investors expect the value of their private
counterparts to vary.

So on the one hand these write-downs make sense. On the other
hand, some traditional venture-capital types could perceive these
write-downs as a "down round" or something like an admission from
investors that a startup isn't growing as fast as hoped. This,
traditionally, was seen as a kiss of death.

The other factor often discussed on this theme is a "reach
for yield," or the idea that in an investing landscape with
seemingly scarce opportunities for investors to earn solid
returns, one must go outside their usual investment area to find
good investments.

This theory then brings wealthy investors, who typically
park tons of money at a large bank like Morgan Stanley,
to have it evenly spread around the world of widely accepted
investment alternatives to a company like Uber instead.